September 22, 2013

The following roundup features noteworthy news, reports and opinions on solitary confinement from the past week that have not been covered in other Solitary Watch posts.

• Salon writes about the solitary confinement of Michael Douglas’s son, Cameron Douglas, after the actor made an Emmy-night statement denouncing the conditions in which his son is being held.

• According to the Denver Post, half of all Colorado parolees who went on to be charged with murder has been held in solitary confinement while in prison–and often released directly to the streets.

• In the Atlantic, Andrew Cohen reports on the suicide of a man with severe mental illness who was being held in extreme isolation at the federal government’s ADX supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.

• A Los Angeles Timeseditorial condemns the use of solitary confinement on people in immigrant detention. It praises ICE’s recent decision to curtail the use of isolation, and urges Congress to restrict the practice by law.

• The New Orleans Times-Picayunereports on Angola 3 member Albert Woodfox’s legal motion to put a stop to the strip searches he must undergo every time he leaves his solitary confinement cell–often several times a day. The 68-year-old Woodfox has been in solitary for 41 years.

• In the National Law Journal, Columbia Law professor Vivian Berger writes a measured opinion piece opposing prison isolation, titled “Solitary Confinement’s High Costs More Than Monetary.”

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BRAVO for Michael Douglas’s denouncement of solitary confinement! And sadly, it seems, that unless you are at first hands involvement and it happens to one of your own or close to it, the general public, the masses, do not know? And people NEED TO KNOW!!! No one would condone solitary confinement and I mean NOBODY! It must be stopped and stopped IMMEDIATELY!!!
And EVERYONE needs to HELP!
Let us do what we may, to stop this in harmony and blatant violation of human rights?